Document text
Excite@Home customers still wonder when service will end From wire and staff reports Foundering Excite@Home cut off its high-speed Internet service to more than 900,000 AT&T cable customers early Saturday, a day after a bankruptcy judge gave the Internet provider permission to shut down its service. Charter Communications has 5,000 @Home customers in the Rogue Valley, including Ashland, where Charter is locked in stiff competition with the city-owned Ashland Fiber Network. Some Rogue Valley residents reported receiving phone call recordings from Charter, which said that online service would be discontinued at some point this coming week. The cutoff didn't affect Excite@Home's 2.8 million other users, whose cable providers were negotiating Saturday to retain the service. Excite@Home, which is seeking higher fees from cable providers, canceled AT&T's service after talks with the telecommunications giant broke off. AT&T, meanwhile, began moving its high-speed Internet customers onto a new broad-band network that it has been building in anticipation of Excite@Home's collapse. AT&T officials said they shifted 86,000 customers to the new network Saturday morning, and they expect to have all customers moved within 10 days - an even faster transition than they had predicted before the negotiations broke down. The launch of the new network raises questions about whether AT&T will continue its $307-million bid to buy Excite@Home's assets. Redwood City, Calif.-based Excite@Home is the leading provider of high-speed Internet service, with about 3.7 million customers in North America. But mounting losses forced it to seek bankruptcy protection Sept. 30. On Friday, a federal bankruptcy judge canceled the contracts requiring the company to provide high-speed Internet service to more than a dozen cable operators. The judge gave the company permission to shut off service as early as Saturday if it could not win more lucrative deals from the operators. A group of cable companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Cox Communications, offered Excite@Home significantly more money than AT&T's original bid, but the amount and the terms didn't satisfy all parties, a source close to the negotiations said. AT&T holds a controlling interest in the Internet company; Comcast and Cox own smaller stakes. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.